Untold Stories of the Jocko Lakes Fire

SEELEY LAKE – It's been 10 years since the Jocko Lakes Fire threatened Seeley Lake. With the help of rehabilitation efforts following the fire, the landscape has gone from black destruction to green rebirth. Now agencies and landowners have turned their focus to preventing the next fire.

At the end of the Jocko Lakes Fire, there were more than 100 miles of dozer lines to be rehabbed.

Scott Tomson and Shane Hendrickson, the two resource specialists assigned from the Lolo National Forest, worked with various agencies on the rehabilitation. Tomson said they tried to keep dozer lines to a minimum and place them where they would be the most effective with the least ecological impact.

"Professionally you are trying to balance being reasonable and knowing that your community is at risk, but trying to do the other part of your job of limiting the impacts and mitigate the suppression-rated damages to the land," said Tomson.

Dozer lines and safety zones were rehabbed during the fall of 2007. Crews put in water bars, a ridge made across a slope to catch water and sediments, on the firelines and excavators placed vegetation on the exposed ground to prevent erosion. Some of the lines and safety zones were reseeded to help prevent weed infestations.

During the summer of 2008, undersized and damaged culverts were replaced and other improvements needed to the road systems were completed.

Large areas of the fire were stand-replacing because it was so dry and the fire was wind-driven carrying in the tree crowns. Plum Creek salvaged as much of their burned timber as possible. Plum Creek Forester Roger Marshall said the trees needed to be harvested within the first year before they were valueless.

Lodgepole pine regeneration came in naturally because their cones are serotinous - sealed with wax and open only when exposed to fire. However, without a seed-source from other species, the agencies and Plum Creek planted Douglas fir, larch and ponderosa seedlings. Marshall said Plum Creek planted more than one million trees in the burn area including the entire top of Fawn Peak.

"The reality is 10 years later you go out there and the forest is coming back and it looks like rebirth, not death and destruction," said Tomson. "Things bounce back pretty quickly because these landscapes are adapted to fire."

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Despite the swaths of destruction, the Jocko Lakes Fire did not change how local agencies manage fire.

The DNRC is still mandated to put all fires out since most of their protection is within the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). Since the Jocko Lakes Fire was under state protection it was put out.

The USFS has a different mission which allows more flexibility when managing wildland fires. Wildfire management strategies range from full suppression to monitoring and allowing the fire to play its natural ecological role for resource benefit. The full range of management strategies can be employed on different parts of large fires.

Prescribed fire has been proposed as an effective tool for fuels mitigation and reintroducing uncharacteristic wildfire on the landscape. However Steve Wallace, Incident Contract Project Inspector for the USFS in the Northern Rockies, doesn't see it as a viable option for the area.

First, local agencies don't do a lot of it and therefore are not very good at it. Second, it is expensive, and third, a 100 percent control rate is expected, making it a career decision to light the match.

"If you light a fire and it goes gunny sack and burns down a house or houses, everyone is like 'What were you thinking?'" said Wallace who can't think of anyone currently in a fire management position locally that would risk their career to burn a few acres. "In my whole career [34 years with the DNRC], we didn't put a million dollars into pre-suppression. There never is going to be a lot of money for pre-suppression."

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Despite no major policy changes, the Jocko Lakes Fire did highlight the need for the agencies and the public to get more aggressive with fuels mitigation.

Support for timber sales on DNRC lands increased right after the Jocko Lakes Fire, allowing them to complete more sales, especially in the Placid Lake area.

While the USFS had already been doing hazardous fuels mitigation prior to the Jocko, the Southwest Crown of the Continent Collaborative, including the Seeley Lake, Swan Lake and Lincoln Ranger Districts, was one of 10 groups that received federal funding for the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) in 2009. The 10-year funding package has enabled the Seeley Lake RD to implement a variety of landscape-level projects including reducing the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire and fuels reduction on lands adjacent to the WUI.

During the Jocko Lakes Fire, the USFS harvested 100-200 feet along the West Bypass Road as a primary line defense that paralleled the shaded fuel break.

"We wanted to expand that. It was called the West Side Project but it hasn't been implemented," said retired Seeley Lake District Ranger Tim Love. "They were planning it when I retired [in 2015] but we need to do something because that is a priority for community protection."

The 2008 revision of the Seeley-Swan Fire Plan included the primary lines of defense around the community. The Seeley-Swan Fuels Mitigation Task Force published the first Fire Plan in 2004 to help guide and focus wildfire mitigation activities in the WUI.

"The Jocko fire helped us push to move things faster and helped us better establish the need for fuels mitigation dollars," said Jon Haufler, current co-chair of the Task Force. "I think the Jocko really helped people [on the Double Arrow Ranch] realize and get more active in fuels mitigation."

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Bob Wasson estimated he was on the Double Arrow Ranch Landowner Association (DARLOA) Fire Safety Committee for more than a dozen years when he lived on the Double Arrow Ranch. It was on a tour of the Bitterroot Fires in 2001 when he and his wife Bonnie realized the importance of defensible space.

"To me it was black and white, if you had defensible space, you had a home," said Wasson. "If you didn't have defensible space, and I will define that as a lawn, the roof was in the basement."

The Wassons had an inspection with the DNRC. They were told to cut all the lodgepole and then select from the larch, ponderosa and fir that were left.

Even though the Ranch covenants state they couldn't cut more than 10 percent of the trees greater than six inches in any given year, the Wassons went ahead with their plan calling himself the "primary violator" of the covenant that still exists.

"The Double Arrow is down wind and uphill which is a bad combination," said Wasson. That combined with heavy fuel loading and limited access makes it a high-risk situation for firefighters.

Wasson said that half of the undeveloped properties are investments. The owners don't want to cut the trees, but would rather let the people who purchase the property manage the forest.

"That is good advice but it doesn't take into account the guy across the street is going to burn down because of someone's investment," said Wasson.

The areas that the Fire Safety Committee and DNRC determined needed fuel treatment following an assessment in 2006 became the object of Wasson's scrutiny.

Those interested in the program had a property assessment completed by a forester with Clearwater Resource Council who helped them make a plan, find a contractor and help fund the project. CRC provided grant money to pay up to 75 percent of the cost for the fuels reduction. Any merchantable logs could be sold to help cover the homeowners' costs. The only stipulation was that the homeowner could not make money.

Wasson is satisfied with the fuels mitigation that has been completed in the past 10 years including mitigation of the DNRC's quarter section in-holding on the Ranch and the USFS Horseshoe Hills area, to the south of the Ranch. He said there is still more to do.

"We have been pretty protected by our public neighbors and it [is] up to us on the Double Arrow to carry on and help our neighbors," said Wasson. "If your [home] burns down it was because the wind was blowing or you weren't prepared."

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The $31.5 million price tag for the 2007 Jocko Lakes Fire made it the costliest fire in Montana history. However, since then costs have only risen.

Wallace said in 1988 he could get a Type VI engine for $35 per hour including two people, 400 gallons of water, hose, and tools. Today that same engine costs $2,000 per day. Agencies facing budget costs and aging equipment are having a hard time maintaining a fleet of engines so more and more contractors are being used in wildland firefighting.

"We are seeing contractors who are seeing this as the future and they are treating it as a business. I think the shift is a great shift that is long overdue," said Wallace. "What better way for the government to get money into the private sector."

"The Rising Cost of Wildfire Operations," published by the Forest Service in August 2015, shows that the cost of wildland fire in 1995, including preparedness, suppression and other related programs, consumed 16 percent of its annual budget. This increased to 52 percent in 2015 and is projected to reach 67 percent by 2025.

Also in the report, the Forest Service stated that climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970. The US burns twice as many acres as three decades ago and Forest Service scientists believe the acreage burned may double again by mid-century. Increasing development in fire-prone areas also puts more stress on the Forest Service's suppression efforts.

Locally, fire managers are still trying to figure out how the national trends of hotter, drier temperatures and longer fire seasons play out and how the strategies and tactics that once were effective need to be adapted to achieve the same success.

"Everyone has a responsibility to make their property safer in terms of fire," said Tomson. "I think the message that agencies are giving and you are going to hear more in the future is that it is not our responsibility if your house burns down. We are not going to put people in there and lives at risk just to save one home."

"I've told people over and over that the area is going to burn not just because the planet is warming, it is going to burn because of all this fuel," said Wallace. "We can do some work to help mitigate those impacts. But I'm telling you, when the weather is right, when the temperature, fuels, humidity and the wind, when it all comes together and we have ignition, there will be another big fire."

Changes to Homeowner Insurance Policies

Tom Monaghan, owner of Summit Insurance Agency, Inc., has been selling insurance for more than 15 years. He said he has never had an insurance company tell him that someone needs a certain amount of defensible space to be insured. What has changed is different carriers/companies have added the density of the forest as a criteria in their equation for whether a place is insurable and is a factor in the cost to insure.

Monaghan only has one of more than ten carriers he works with that will not write homeowner’s property insurance in the Seeley Lake area and it only has to do with forest density.

“The difference is some of the carriers have built in a wildfire rating. It is one more metric in the system to help them determine whether they want to write a risk,” said Monaghan who didn’t see the rating until 2011-2012 timeframe. “At absolutely no point does a carrier say [homes] need 150 feet of defensible space.”

Monaghan said that when an insurance company becomes unprofitable for any reason, they will start to peel off business by not renewing or find issues that allow them to legally cancel policies or by not accepting new business for a given area.

“Could someone see that a carrier doesn’t want to write up here anymore? Sure,” said Monaghan. “But it could have absolutely nothing to do with wildfire.”